Isabella's Cottage Pie

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs redskin potatoes
• 1 cup of whole milk
• 1/4 cup of butter - melted
• Salt to taste
• 1 lb ground beef 
• 1 package of mushrooms
• 1/2 an onion, minced
• 2 tbs olive oil
• 1/2 tbs rosemary
• 3 cloves garlic or to taste
• pepper to taste

This is more time consuming than it is difficult.  Particularly if you have a cranky oven like mine.   First, start a pot of boiling water.   There should be enough water to cover the potatoes but don't put them in yet.  Wait until the water is boiling and then put the potatoes in.  Leave them to boil until they are soft (is it easy to pass a fork through them?  Then they are done.).

In a frying pan, put in the olive oil (any oil will do really but I loved the wild mushroom and rosemary infused olive oil with this recipe).  Once it's heated up a bit, put in the minced onion and chopped up mushrooms.   Let them cook until they are browned.  Once they are browned, put in the ground beef.  Let that cook all the way through.

In another bowl, melt some butter (I cheated and did this in the microwave).  Add the butter and milk to a mixing bowl.  Once the potatoes are done, mash them up with a fork (or a masher), in the mixing bowl.  Add some salt and get your mixer to finish blending everything together.  You'll have some very creamy mashed potatoes.

While the meat is cooking, preheat the oven to 400F.  Once the meat is cooked, add the rosemary, salt, pepper, and garlic to the meat, mushrooms, and onions.  Put the meat, mushrooms, and onions in the bottom of a deep, oven safe dish.  On top of that, put the mashed potatoes.  Cook this until the mashed potatoes turn a golden yellow - about 20 more minutes.

The serving size is 4 and it's about 350 calories per a serving.  I might add carrots next time but it was delicious this way as well.  I wanted something with potatoes for Saint Patrick's Day.  :-D

Draping an early Venetian Bodice

 Step One:  You'll need about a yard of fabric, folded in half.  You can use the 36" wide muslin or any cheap fabric.  I'm using a piece of an old bedsheet that I'm so glad I get to destroy.  I really didn't like them.

 Step Two:  In the middle of the folded fabric, make a cut a couple of inches deep.  This is partly to mark the middle of the folded fabric and also to help cut out the next step.

 Step Three:  Draw a half circle around the cut.  It does not need to be perfect.   All it needs to be is deeper in the front than in the back of the still folded piece of fabric.

 The above is to show the circular piece cut out.  What you can do is cut it out for the back and then cut it deeper for the front.  Just fold the cut out piece at the half way mark to make both even if you like.

 Step Four:  Put the fabric with the cut out neckhole on the dress dummy.

 Step Five: Pin the fabric tight at the sides.  For this project, we are going to use the K.I.S.S. principle and make it a side lacing bodice.

 This is to show the back of the pinned-at-the-sides fabric.

 Step six:  You'll want to pinch the fabric at the arms to figure out where to cut.  You'll want to leave about 1" or more fabric along the edges for now so you have some play room.

 Step seven:  Cut the fabric away.  You should have something similar to the above.

 Step eight:  Don't forget to pin the shoulder area and cut that excess away.  You might have to pull up a bit on the fabric to get a decent about of fabric pinched up at the shoulder.

 Step nine:  Continue to pull the fabric tight.  You might find that pinning the fabric to the dress dummy directly down the back and front helps slightly.  It's okay if you end up with darts in odd places - just pin them so they are flat as I've done in the above photo.  We'll draft out the darts when you cut this out to make the final pattern.

 Step ten:  You might find it easier to draw out the lines for the armsyce before you cut it.

 Step eleven: Once the armsyce is cut and you are pretty happy with how tight the bodice is, cut away the rest of the excess fabric.  Since this is an Italian bodice, you'll want to cut away the excess below the bust as well as around the side lace opening.

Step Twelve: One you have it to the length you want, it's time to cut out your desired neckline.  I've drawn in what I'd like the neckline to be.  Don't forget about seams!  You want about 1/4" higher than your actual desired neckline.

Step thirteen: Double check everything.  I had to tighten the bottom part of the bodice in the picture above.  Once you've double checked everything, all you need is half the front and half the back to make a pattern.

Step fourteen: Copy the draped pieces to either fabric or paper to make a pattern.  The back should be easy but if you have any darts, like I do on the front, draft those out.  For more information on how to do that, please refer to how to take a commercial pattern and make it into a reasonably period pattern. There are pictures of drafting - or pinching- out the dart of a commercial pattern. The steps are the same as you would do here.

In the picture above, I'm comparing the side widths of both the front and back.  You'll want to compare with the shoulders as well - make sure they are the same and cut off any excess.

Yay!  Final pattern!  I've been using a pattern I made using this technique for well over 8 years now.  It works beautifully.  Over the next week, I'll make a new Italian gown using this new pattern to show the fit and drape - as well as how to use this pattern to make a gown.

Draping an 18th Century Jacket

So, now you know I made a jacket for the Historical Fortnightly Sew UFO challenge. :-) However, explaining everything I did to get to a jacket would be very, very long for one blog spot. Due to this, I've split it up into three posts. Here's the previous post on how to draft a sleeve. This post is focusing on the body of the jacket. The pattern I end up with can easily be modified to be used for a robe a l'anglaise as well.

First, you need a piece of cheap fabric. I used about a yard or so of muslin and cut a hole slightly off center. You want more fabric to the back than the front so it will hang evenly on the dress dummy. As you can see below.

Also, any undergarments you will be wearing with the outfit you are draping needs to be on the dress dummy as well. In this case, my hideous stays. I made sure they closed on the dress dummy the way they do on me. :-) Important to make sure this outfit will fit me the same way it does the dress dummy!

The next thing I do is take two pins (you will need a lot of pins) and just put them a bit loosely right at the underarms. This is so I can see where I need to cut the armsyce first -this helps a lot with final visualization.

The arms do not need to be perfect at first, as you can see below. Just visible.

After cutting away the armsyce, I pin the sides loosely at the sides - just tight enough so I can see a humanish shape. 

Since I do not want the seams directly on the side, I've pinned the seam further back - where it will end up on the final pattern.

Once that's done, I started "pinching" the back where I want the seams to be for the 18th Century jacket.  This follows the general pattern lines for most late 18th Century jackets and dresses (think Janet Arnold).   I've also pinched the shoulders in this picture below.   I change it later on.  And yes, those are my scissors sticking out of the dress dummies neck.  You'll need them often and close at hand to cut off excess fabric.

The entire back is pinched the way I like it for the back panel piece.  It might look a bit uneven but that isn't a big deal - I only ever use one side for the pattern and throw the other side away.

Now to play with the front!  I've pinched the shoulder seam in this photo.  I've also started on the side panels and cut the neckline!

This is a much better photo of the side "pinching".  I also have cut a bit more of the armscye.  I tend to keep cutting it as I go since the fabric will continue to get tighter around that area.

For this photo, I've cut the neckline lower and shaped the left side of the jacket waist to where I want it.

What the final pinched back looks like.  I wanted to keep a "skirt" for the back of the jacket.  I've cut away all the excess fabric on the right side. 

This is what the fabric pieces looks like once I took them off the dress dummy.   I ended up cutting the skirt off for this project and making it a separate piece. 

Here's all the pieces placed together so you can see how the back, sides, and front work together as a flat pattern.  

I hope this was somewhat helpful!   Next, the actual UFO project!

Evidence that TV can at least inspire you to try to do new things on your own

I grew up in a world where working on cars was meant to be done by professionals wearing overalls and holding dirty, oily rags in their back pockets.  This was because cars were complicated machinery that needed precise tools and training on how to use said tools.  Therefore, I didn't really bother to even attempt to ever do anything with a car because I didn't have the tools or the training to work on one.  Or the overalls.

However, I've been completely and totally addicted to the proper Top Gear (ie, the UK version).  For those that haven't seen the show, watch it.  I caught it totally by accident while I was sewing and found myself in laughing fits within a few minutes.  All three guys (the UK version of the three stooges, seriously) are able to show cars as something not scary, not mysterious, and not complicated.  They easily explain why one car is better than another, why things like horsepower and speed might actually be important in your car buying pursuits, and they also show that building or changing up a vehicle isn't brain surgery.    They do some pretty amazing and pretty ridiculous things to the vehicles they are given and explain what they've done.  It's not always err...good, but it is always amusing. 

Watching the show took the mystisim out of car mechanics for me.  They've shown it's just like any other craft project - you just need to figure out what you want to do and start.   Given I've tried almost every craft project out there (sewing, spinning, woodworking, sculpting, ect) and I've built things like desktop computers, after watching the show, it seemed silly to freak out over the horror stories I had heard about working on a car yourself.  (Like changing the oil and going right through the oil pan)

So, with that in mind, I made up my mind to actually fix my broken taillight myself.  Now when I say broken, I mean:

This is, of course, after I took it out.  What happened was I came out of Target to find the passenger taillight like this and a nice big new dent about top of your average shopping cart high right on the passenger side of my Ford Explorer.   No note.  Nothing around.  Just a very broken taillight and a new dent with some paint scraps.  

I wasn't worried about the dent or the paint - I'm not quite that vain about my truck- but I was worried about the taillight.  Originally, I was told it would be $1000+ to fix the truck.  Umm...no.   Instead, I opted for some see thru red tape that you can get at Auto Zone and put that over the broken part.  That worked for a few months but eventually the tape became unsticky.   Also, I want to take my truck through the car wash, darn it!

So, I shopped around and finally found a passenger taillight assembly for $85 total.  It was on Amazon so no shipping fees, yay!  Much better than the original $125 I found and far better than the $200 the shop told me was just for the light ($300 for labor, of course! The rest was for getting the dents out and paint).  It came yesterday but I was sick and really, truly, could not move more than from the sofa to the bed.

Today, thanks to the miracle that is hot tea, I'm feeling much better and figured I'd try and figure this taillight thing out.  After all, how hard could it be? So I went to the world wide web and looked up a few website to see how difficult this really was and exactly what I was getting myself into.  Turns out, it's stupid simple.  This was the video I used to figure out exactly what I was going to do. 

Basically, there are two screws that hold the taillight in place.  These screws are visible from the tailgate area.  You take those out.  You then wiggle the taillight out.  You twist and pop out the lights themselves and...you pop them into the new assembly, pop the new assembly back above the bumper, and screw it all back into place.  Seriously, I've had IKEA furniture that makes this look like a kindergartener's homework. 

Here are the super complicated (I need training!) tools I used:

The only reason I needed to use the flathead screwdriver was because I needed to wedge something small beneath the taillight in order to get the taillight assembly to line up with where the screws went into the truck frame.   It worked perfectly.

The one complication was that on the broken taillight, one of the metal stays that is meant to go into the plastic taillight and secure it to the truck frame had broken off completely:

You can see the top metal stay/screw in the near dead center upper part of the photo.  Where my fingers are pointing is where the other one should be.  Luckily, the new taillight assembly came with two new metal stays/screws so I didn't have to attempt to yank the one in the photo above or the one in the broken piece of plastic out.  Because that would not have been fun.

All and all, it took about ten minutes to pop out the old assembly and pop in the new one.  That includes me going back in the house to grab the flathead screwdriver because the holes would not aline properly.  Here's the new taillight on the truck:

So, yeah, the dent is still there.  However, I can now take the truck through the car wash without any worries.  Woohoo!  (And it didn't cost me $1000 to fix. ;-) )

And with that bombshell (a la Top Gear), Good Night!

A New Dress Form? Not so much

With the help of my Mom, I thought I could get a duct tape dummy of me and have a lovely dress form so I could drape stuff....

Yeah no.

It ended up so bad that my Mom and I were laughing hysterically and Mom told me she'd buy me a new dress form as an early Christmas gift.   Here is the full story:

  Meet Picaso.   Picaso is the finished project of myself being draped into a trash bag and my Mom attempting to use Duct Tape.   The duct tape kept sticking to itself because Mom simply couldn't keep the tape in a straight line and then we'd have to cut the ends off before even getting the duct tape onto the trash bag...it was a half hour mess.

 The back with apparent back boobage.  I didn't realize I had that much fat back there.  (I don't.  What was going on is I have to keep moving my arms to help Mom put the duct tape on me which caused my shoulder blades to fill out the back more...and Mom to tape more and you get...c cups in the back.)

 And a curved spine! 

 Seriously, this is the back.

....a really curved spine.

 So, I thought to myself, maybe this project could be salvaged.  Maybe, just maybe, I might be able to cut it up, make a pattern from it - ignore seam allowances since it was clear it was way too big (every time I'd shift my weight, there would be a huge gap between me and the duct taped trashbag.  I know what the issue was and, next time, Mom is just going to have to stand on a stool!)

 The pieces.  I had cut the duct tape pieces to force them to lie flat, traced around them, and got...this.

 This is what the pieces looked like before they were stuffed but after they were sewn up. 

And the finished dress dummy that is still WAY too big!   It's actually a good two sizes bigger than my actual measurements.  Anyone need a lovely pink and purple homemade size 14 (jeans size, not sewing pattern size) dress dummy?